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Craving Creating Time
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler To what extent are our tasks and our days predictable, or our decisions clear-cut? The days of police, firefighters or emergency medical personnel are unpredictable, but so is anyone who has their door, phone or email open to their colleagues, students and the rest of campus. As we manage meetings, queries and emails the way a station handles trains, we often crave blocks of time. We seek the moments of immersion in planning, thinking or creating where ideas can flow or at least be worked through without interruption. Why might these full mornings focused on a project matter? Paul Graham suggests programmers and other “makers”…
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Observations From a Returned Prairie Girl
By Carolyn Hoessler This month marks a full year since arriving on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. After growing up in the Red River Valley area of Manitoba and spending over a decade in Ontario, I was back to the Prairies. In arriving here, I came to a land familiar in landscape but distinct in the people and places. What was different and why does it matter to a University? The land around us shapes who we are if we stay still long enough to listen to what the seasons can teach us. This is what I have noticed. Inspired by the winters, our buildings are connected. Even…
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Weeds, Cheating and Success
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler I remember pulling weeds in a vegetable garden and coming across a strong healthy canola plant whose seed must have drifted in from the neighbour’s field. Was it a weed? If it had grown in the field then it would be considered a strong specimen, but what about in a vegetable garden? What about milkweed, wildflowers or grass? Sharing ideas and drawing on one another’s skills to reach the best answer, process check or polish a report are valued skills in the workplace and even within group projects in classes. However, during a typical test these same behaviours would be considered cheating. In his post,…
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Mind the Gap: Learning Communities, Transitions, and Educational Enrichment
[social-bio] By Erin DeLathouwer “What kind of job can I even get with an x degree?” I’ve heard this question again and again in my time as the program coordinator of learning communities, and I suggest that the anxiety that motivates this question comes from the fact that transitions are hard. For first-year students, for peer mentors, for new faculty, for recent graduates, and for those of us navigating from one job to another – transitions are hard. The difficulties involved in transitions in life are mitigated, however, by education – specifically, the enriching experiences that a good education tends to provide. In my experience, transitions aren’t supposed to be…
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Anything But …
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Not exams. Not this example. Not that textbook again…Anything but that! Our rejection of a particular method or medium for teaching may be motivation enough to try something new. However, “Not ____” just rules out a single direction, leaving open all other possibilities. Deciding between the many alternatives involves setting a goal and sensing what features we want to change and what we want to retain. For example, “Not an exam” leaves open many possibilities depending on our goals. If we want to measure students’ learning of all material in the course, we can decide to keep the end-of-term timing of final exams. A second…
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We Are All Treaty People
By Tereigh Ewert In the fall, the office of the VP Teaching and Learning began offering treaty education to faculty and staff at the University of Saskatchewan. Each month, a cohort of people engaged in an online module, and then their learning culminated in a three-hour face-to-face session with a Traditional Knowledge Keeper who further illuminated treaty history and issues, and who also provided some critical cultural context. Gordon Barnhart, in his 2007 speech to the throne, made treaty education mandatory in the K-12 school system, so our upcoming generation has some knowledge of treaty history and issues. But for most of the rest of us, we have had little…
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Richness of Research on Active Learning: Let’s Stand on the Shoulders of Giants (or at least Other Educators)
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and scholarship of teaching and learning research promote the benefits of active learning, student engagement, and faculty-student interaction with courses that challenge students, shake them out of the passive listener role, and engage them in collaboration with peers to improve student academic performance. Prior evidence and strategies are summarized for several disciplinary areas including. Cell biology Education by Deborah Allen & Kimberly Tanner Engineering Education by Smith, Sheppard, Johnson and Johnson or by Prince Physiology education by Joel Micheal In addition to research studies in many disciplines including: History and political science Geography and Environment studies For a…
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With Great Power …
[social-bio] I am a regular reader of University Affairs. I always find it an interesting place to hear about what is making news in Canadian higher education. In particular, I like looking at the ‘most popular articles’ section just in case there are articles that I should pay attention to that I have somehow missed. That is how I stumbled across an article by Shirley Katz from 2000, titled “Sexual relations between students and faculty”. Most of the article was what I expected (ie. don’t do it! – there are too many possible conflicts of interest and risks associated with such relationships). While I have a number of questions about…
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Grades: Something to Lose, Something to Gain
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler At the start of each course, the syllabus outlines the assessments on which students’ marks will be based. Through this document, a rubric given with the assignment, or after receiving the marked up pages, students learn how we have chosen to grade. Specifically, they have learned if we are focused on loss or gain. We can frame grades as starting from nothing with everything to gain through phrases such as “Everyone starts with 0, work hard and you will earn marks on each assignment”. Whether a student’s goal is 50 or 90, they all start with zero and have nothing to lose. Assignments are marked…
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What is CAT 1.0?
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler So what is “CAT” beyond our nickname for our Curriculum Alignment Tool? It is an online software for academic programs and instructors to fill in information about your courses, connect those courses within a program, and review what you are teaching your students. Designed as one approach to gathering data about programs, CAT fits into the inventory stage of the curriculum renewal cycle (see Susan & Sheryl’s dynamic video or diagram ). Focusing on an instructor’s approach to their course, CAT asks about instructional strategies, assessment methods and timing, course outcomes and connection with program outcomes. CAT is particularly good at displaying trends and allowing for…